


My Sweet Disease, May It Take Me Gently

by KriegsaffeNo9



Category: Little Witch Academia
Genre: Detox, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Exes, Forgiveness, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-17
Updated: 2018-03-17
Packaged: 2019-04-01 10:52:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13996722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KriegsaffeNo9/pseuds/KriegsaffeNo9
Summary: The story of Croix Meridies's dance with Saturn's horse: how it began, and how it will change.





	My Sweet Disease, May It Take Me Gently

_This is it, the apocalypse_

* * *

Croix was 14 the first time she did heroin. Her dad was not especially good at hiding his habits, and one lonesome day when he was out cold, she found a little bit of his stash--powdered heroin, as his usual provider of tar out of town dodging the cops. She was intimidated by needles in those halcyon days of youth, and knew her father would sooner miss one of his insulin needles than what she expected would be an eminently missable line of powdered heroin.

Either he didn't notice or didn't care. Or maybe he was proud of her. She used a little magic to liberate a pinch of the stuff from the plastic vial he had purchased, lined it up on a hand mirror she used for makeup (the three patches of blush untouched from the day she had bought it), and with a five-pound note sniffed it all up.

Eventually she would learn that eyeballing a dose of heroin was equivalent to guessing the loadedness of a shotgun before sticking it in one's mouth and pulling the trigger. That gloomy Sunday, though, she spent lying on the couch in the greenhouse and watching the rain, the radio playing music she half-listened to, every muscle so un-tensed, so relaxed, she felt less like she was on the couch so much as spread across it like jam. Pain was a distant memory. All of it was gone, pain she barely realized she had--pain in her heels from days of hiking out into the woods to acquire reagents and collect beetles and fairies, pain from old scrapes in her knees, pain in her eyes from hours of reading with minimal blinks, pain lingering in her heart from scattering her mother's ashes in the ruins of the ancestral Meridies library.

She attended Luna Nova and created Shiny Chariot without touching it again. Around the time she started working on the Dream Fuel Spirit, she had amassed enough personal wealth that she could purchase some decent stuff, black tar sweetened with wine smuggled out of the Dreamlands. She purchased her first dose from a witch, a beautiful one she met in a bondage club who dressed like she'd stepped out of an issue of Heavy Metal. Croix didn't ask any questions like "are you also a prostitute" because she was at the time not that kind of a woman.

All she did was smoke some of that black tar heroin and feel all the pain go away.

When the two parted ways--Croix and Chariot, not Croix and heroin--the magic community politely informed the both of them that they had better think long and hard about the next time they would show their faces and be glad that the mundane fallout of whatever blasted the moon was more than punishment enough. For all her brilliance in the arts of witchery and science and roadieing and sex, it was too late when she realized she and Chariot were not rich, merely flush with cash, and her tragically good-natured and friendly cut of the profits left her with a pathetic amount of capitol and no real investments.

None besides a lot of unused heroin, stored hermetically in otherspaces. She limited herself in those innocent days--no more than twice a month when absolutely nothing was on the line anywhere in arm's reach, and with Chariot, there was always something about to burst into flame. It had thus a long time between hits, and absence made the heart grow fonder.

That first night away from Chariot, huddled in a youth hostel in the furthest, least-used bunk she could find, she analyzed her stock of junk and mused, however briefly, on how she had substantially more heroin than it would take to kill herself.

After a cost-benefit analysis, she concluded that being alive was, in the short term, at least, the more efficient way of changing the world.

And so she fell away from the witching world and peddled her services to the mundane, made a few wise-ish investments, swindled sweet ingenues out of obscene piles of money, and pondered, in her hubris and self-hatred, turning a trick or two to see what would happen. Maybe go back to that bondage club, see if the nice witch she bought from was indeed also a prostitute and could give her tips. F for F, looking for a good time, donations appreciated, it would help if you are a redhead with a body that would make Aphrodite jealous enough to curse you.

She never did sell her body. Not to a person, at least.

Not a year out on the street, and one cold night she realized that smoking heroin didn't do it for her anymore. Every foil pipe was money up in smoke to no benefit. (So why not sell it? For that matter, surely you can part with one of your kidneys...) So she did her homework, and on that drizzling, icy night in the United States, she ventured out to a Wal-Mart to acquire supplies.

Even as late as 10 in the evening there were a handful of families out shopping, harried women with their children cradled at their chest or slung over their shoulders and snoozing. Or their children were running about with Nerf guns still in the package. There was one other person in the diabetic supplies aisle, some young man staring at a row of diabetic-friendly breakfast drinks with the expression of someone watching their child's remains extracted from a wreck.

By the time she had finally settled on a gauge of needle, he had fumbled to the ground, the packages on the shelves behind him gently rattling as he lay his back against them. She glanced at him, briefly, then walked away. No words.

She felt like an astronaut.

At the time she was in some nowhere town in Pennsylvania that somehow had its own sorcerer's stone. The cheapest motel in range of the stone was once a German dance hall. It looked quaint from the air, but it had a substantial ant problem she had to deal with herself. Surely she was not the only person who had shot up in this hotel... probably not even this room. She was not the first person to sleep in this hotel to find that misery was the strongest force in the human experience, but perhaps the first to verify it scientifically.

That first time, she carried out the whole process in a mundane fashion, just to see how the other side did it. In spite of everything she was and had seen and done, there was something profoundly novel about jabbing a wet cotton ball and pulling out the liquid. Squeezing a sponge was so gauche in comparison. She fumbled with tying off her arm and came perilously close to using a simple checkup spell to pull a vein to the surface. No, idiot; if you make it too easy, you'll go through all of it, and what will you have left?

She pricked the raised vein, pulled back on the plunger of the little insulin needle, and saw a cloud of blood color the clear suspension of distilled water and heroin. She closed her eyes, pumped the warm liquid into her veins, dropped the needle on the ground, and waited.

When the heroin hit her brain she was not elevated; she was rescued. It had never been this powerful, never been this perfect, and she had never needed to be rid of more pain. She stared at the wall, seeing nothing but white stucco, feeling nothing but the absence of pain.

Yes, it felt good, she could say; but the feeling of the drug, like an orgasm in an event horizon, stretching forever and never ending, was second to the absence of pain. Pleasure she could manufacture in all sorts of ways. The regret, the hate, that she could not destroy. This wouldn't destroy it either, mind. The pain would be waiting for her when she woke up, she knew.  
But in the moment, the tension leaving her back and neck and brow and breath, she could pretend that this would be forever. She lied about all sorts of things to everyone around her: how her mother died, how her father died, that she still had hopes and dreams. Why stop at lying to herself? The truth was for failures. Let the blood lie; let the brain believe.

She fell asleep watching a little blue spirit in a jar sobbing hysterically. When she woke up, ants were crawling on her face.

All things considered, that she had designed, experimented, iterated, and implemented the Sorcery Solution System while on a steady drip of horse should be considered by small minds a miracle. Why, yes, she'd done a lot of hard work before sinking into the life of a migratory confidence worker and junkie, but the switchover from harnessing magic potential to harnessing the mana generated by feelings was such a dramatic paradigm shift it required reworking the harnessing and propulsion system from the ground up. That shit took effort, lots of menial, soul-numbing effort, so if she had no soul to numb she was invincible, unstoppable.

The Noir Rod, though... that beauty she had conceived, formulated, manufactured, and implemented while stone sober. Sobriety was a necessity. The spirits knew when she was high. On the drug her anxiety and anger were absent, her despair was too muted, her fear hate too distant, for the fuel spirits to feed. When the withdrawal crept in and her body felt like it was tearing itself apart, muscle from bone, the spirits grew fat on her agony. Through her pain she taught them the feelings that made them strong. When she had made sufficient forward progress, or the sickness too profound, she shot up and embraced the nothingness.

Years passed in this black symbiosis.

When the time had come to make her move on Luna Nova... well, by then she had built up a store of Methadone. It was easy to pretend she was sober.

The rest... well, you know the rest.

Besides the overdose, and what came after.

* * *

That beautiful Christmas day, in a room with a lovely view of the Luna Nova courtyard, Chariot set down her wine.

"You're not just here to visit me," she said.

"No," Croix said, not looking her in the eye. Down in the courtyard, Sucy stood astride the dead Dark Young, soaked in steaming-hot ichor and hefting some gruesome trophy over her head while Akko took a picture. "Chariot, I'm sick."

Chariot touched her hand.

"I..." Croix said. "I can't keep looking, not while I'm still... not when I still..." She searched for her words. "I can't cure you if I can't cure myself. I lose days to the sickness, I lose days to the healing, I'm burning out and I can't stop. I need help." Her voice was quieter, needier, than she ever hoped to sound. "I need to detox. Desperately. I can't do it myself. I've tried. It never takes. I pussy out or I leave and cheat and... fuck." She brushed sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, flinging it to the ground in a fan of spray. "I've been on Methadone too long."

Chariot took her hand with both hands.

"We start tonight," Chariot said.

"Two weeks," Croix said. "I'm going to be a burden on you for two weeks."

"We can do two weeks."

"Flagg damn us both, we'd better."

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> This felt a lot longer when I was writing it, but I was writing it in pieces across a road trip when even normal LWA writing suddenly became a lot harder to put out. Hopefully this block will clear out soon enough or I'mma be mad.
> 
> FTL shouldn't be too long in the waiting... shouldn't be. Might be a good time to upload another part of the Sadie Miller Story...


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